Clinton’s Speech: The Power of a Hug

Bill Clinton’s speech was excellent for all the reasons I thought Julián Castro’s speech the previous evening was weak. In confusing times, good leaders can help the public understand our politics, and as Obama himself has admitted, he has not always excelled at this over the last few years. But it’s long been Bill Clinton’s special gift. Indeed, Clinton’s frustration with his party’s inability to explain what’s going on politically in this country helped encourage him to write his recent book, “Back To Work.” (In it, he tells a story about being rebuffed when he tried to give the Democratic National Committee some advice on talking points for the 2010 election.) This was not so much a speech about Obama, but one about the choice voters face and the framework they should use in making it.

Clinton started with a favorite subject of his: the coöperation that he sees among parties trying to solve problems around the world through his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. However, here in the U.S., despite President Obama’s best efforts, an unreasonable and ideological political faction has made coöperation impossible. From there he pivoted to recent history, making a seemingly dispassionate case for why no President, even Clinton himself, could ever have repaired in four years all the damage Obama found when he arrived in the White House in 2009. But despite that, Obama’s record, told with excruciating but powerfully persuasive detail, has been far better than is popularly understood. Now he just needs his contract renewed to finish the job. Clinton made it all sound so simple.

This was the anti-Michelle speech. While she naturally gave personal testimony about Barack Obama’s character and urged voters to support him on that basis, in the story Clinton told Obama was an ephemeral figure. There were few personal details or anecdotes about the President because Clinton isn’t particularly close to Obama. It was a speech about facts and three and a half years of decisions made and outcomes achieved. By the end of it, the only logical conclusion, Clinton argued, is that Obama would do a better job than the alternative.

In a sense, Clinton’s reluctance to embrace Obama personally, and his own fraught history with the President, which I explored in a piece for The New Yorker this week, makes him the ideal spokesman to appeal to those skeptical former Obama voters that his campaign is trying to win back. In an interview with Brian Williams earlier in the day, Clinton said of Obama, “We haven’t been close friends a long time or anything like that, but he knows that I support him.” I found it an amazingly honest statement considering that politicians often go out of their way to exaggerate their fondness for one another.

And it was exactly their lack of personal chemistry and failure to become “close friends” that gave Clinton’s speech its lift. A subtext of the address was that, just like Bill Clinton, wavering voters need not love Obama to understand that he’s a better choice than Romney. When the two Presidents came together and hugged after the speech was (finally) over, the distance between them made their embrace all the more powerful.